Agriculture

Drones offer farmers eye in the sky

Producers can check health of crops and herds with airborne robots

Billy Anderson, left, and David Elder show a small drone Anderson's company sells for viewing and mapping fields. (Jeff Rice / The Fort Morgan Times)

Drones are rapidly finding a niche in modern agriculture. Once considered "big boys' toys," drones now are doing some important work on American farms and ranches.

Day Two of the 2019 Farming Evolution conference held recently in Holyoke included a panel discussion on the use of drones as a serious farming tool. Billy Anderson, who sells drones and accompanying software for Central Plains Equipment in Holyoke, said the small airborne robots can perform a number of surveillance duties around the farm and ranch — but how much work they can do depends on how much money one is willing to spend.

Anderson showed a drone that his company sells for $2,000. The machine comes with what is called an RBG camera, which stands for red-blue-green. Those are the three basic colors video cameras "see" naturally, and combine to make the rest of the color spectrum.

While a basic camera is fine for looking at the surface of a field, Anderson said, it will tell the operator very little about the crop's health. That kind of analysis requires hundreds and sometimes thousands of individual photos of a field, taken in a sequence and then "stitched" together to create an image of the field. And for anything more than an aerial photo of the field — that is, to look at soil moisture and plant health — a near-infrared or NIR camera is required. The software then interprets the images using technology called a normalized difference vegetation index, or NDVI. That's the difference between near-infrared light, which vegetation strongly reflects, and red light, which vegetation absorbs.

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For nighttime surveillance of a cow herd, a rancher might want to employ a true infrared camera.

But drone technology is expensive. According to an online drone buying guide, PrecisionHawk sells a beginner's package called the crop scouting package for just under $2,000, and DJI offers a Smarter Farming package, which the company touts as "an affordable and easy-to-fly ag surveying solution for professional ag service providers and serious farm operators," that goes for upwards of $8,000.

At the other end of the spectrum are the fixed-wing drones for mapping multiple-field operations. The SenseFly eBee SQ can be had for $12,000 and, if you really want to make a business of it, you can pop for PrecisionHawk's Lancaster 5 at $25,000 and up.

Because ag drones are still getting off the ground, so to speak, there is a lot they can't do, and there is some confusion over what kind of paperwork has to be done before someone can fly one commercially.

Ron Meyer, a Sidney, Neb., airplane pilot, said the Federal Aviation Administration requires anyone flying drones as part of their business to adhere to Part 107 Regulations. Those are the regs covering small unmanned aircraft flown by "non-hobbyists."

Meyer said the ceiling for drones is 400 feet and a quick review of the Part 107 regs shows a long list of do's and don'ts: do keep the drone in sight, don't fly it over populated areas or around airports, and so on. Anderson said he had to study an 88-page study guide before he could pass the test for Part 107 certification.

While some large drones can do "spot spraying" of weeds in fields, their size and short battery life prevent them from doing any meaningful application of chemicals, although that may be coming.

For the time being, however, drones can be an affordable way to keep an eye on one's crops and livestock, and catching problems early before they affect yield.

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